Brimstone Bride

by Barbara J. Hancock

  “I feel ancient,” Victoria confessed.

  In the background, Grim had closed his eyes and Michael’s soft snores indicated he’d fallen into a deep and peaceful sleep. Victoria ached to be there with him. To pick him up and rock him while he slept as she had when he was much younger.

  “He is well. He is cared for. Even if there was no danger, you needed to take some time to heal yourself. You haven’t had a moment alone since the opera house fire. You have been sister and mother...you need to find yourself again,” Sybil said. “Reclaim Victoria’s voice.”

  “I don’t know how,” Victoria said. On the screen, she could see the smooth porcelain of Sybil’s lovely forehead wrinkle slightly as the daemon frowned.

  “I have sewn something for you. You’ll find a red dress packed in your luggage. This is a gift freely given. Or perhaps in exchange for your acceptance of me after I....after I threatened Michael and Katherine to try to help Severne. I warned you about love being dangerous, but I offer it to you. I am a daemon and we feel differently, but deeply. More deeply than we can comfortably express.”

  Victoria left the laptop open and turned away to rummage through her luggage. She found a tissue-wrapped parcel she hadn’t noticed in the bottom of one case. She picked it up and brought it over to the vanity to open it in front of the screen.

  The string and pristine white paper came apart easily in her fingers and deep red silk fell into her lap like a bright waterfall. She lifted it and drew it to her cheek to feel its liquid softness. She immediately loved and feared it. The old Victoria would have jumped up to put it on right away, but the Victoria she was now hesitated.

  “I give you this dress to wear when you will. When you need it, you will have it on hand,” Sybil said. “And now I will bid you good night. There’s a small boy who needs to be carried to bed and Grim doesn’t have the arms necessary to perform this service.”

  “Thank you, Sybil,” Victoria said, but the screen had already gone dark.

  Thick with emotion, she hung the dress in the closet without trying it on and then went out into the garden. The fans were still in the distance. The rows and rows of grapevines were peaceful and unthreatened on a dry night in spite of the slight spring chill in the air. The main house was dark. No windows glowed. Her footsteps crunched along the path as if she was the solitary being on the planet who was awake and about.

  Only the growing moon kept her company and illuminated her way. It was slightly more than a sliver now. Its growth was like her hourglass in the sky.

  She didn’t hum or sing. The effort not to express her longing for—something—in song was great. She bit her lip. She clenched her fists against a stomach that swirled with unexpressed lyrics.

  The smoky quality of her voice wasn’t unpleasant. It was changed, and while not suited to opera there were other types of music she could still sing. If she would. If her heart wakened and quickened and allowed her to reclaim what she’d lost when she’d lost Michael’s father to Father Reynard’s daemon blade.

  Adam Turov woke her affinity. He sparked possibilities with his Brimstone blood that she’d thought lost forever. It wasn’t the red dress she was afraid of. It was the song Turov woke in her heart. The need to sing that he loosened in her breast. That need twined inexorably with her need to feel like herself again and to be a passionate woman, not just an automaton surviving day by day in desperate times.

  Michael’s safety came first. His future was paramount. She refused to lose sight of why she was here and the mission she had to fulfill. But Adam Turov was more than just a mission. She couldn’t deny that. He drew her. Oh, how he drew her. And not only because of his Brimstone blood.

  But if she freed his prisoners, Turov would die.

  While she walked, thinking of the red dress that hung so full of potential in the cottage’s closet, she was suddenly interrupted by a sound in the garden. Victoria stopped. She listened, trying to distinguish what she’d heard when all she heard now was the roaring of blood in her ears and the thump of a quickened heartbeat in her chest.

  The sound of metal rasping against metal came from the distance as a breeze lifted tendrils of hair on her cheek and tickled her skin. It sounded like a rusted hinge of a gate. She waited for the clank and latch of the gate being closed, but it never came. The drawn out screeeee had come from somewhere in front of her on the path.

  The slowness of it bothered her. It seemed clandestine and sly as if someone was opening a gate that was supposed to remain closed. She stayed still and silenced her breathing. If she approached the sound, she didn’t know what she might find. If she returned to the cottage, the gate opener might follow her. They might intercept her from behind. Victoria was suddenly more conscious of the darkened main house. The desolation of the night garden around her. If the sound had been caused by a monk, she might face an ugly fight.

  Working for Malachi didn’t automatically protect her from other monks from the Order of Samuel; she would be seen as a valuable commodity for any monk who wanted to grasp for power now that Father Reynard was gone. And there was always the possibility that a daemon would be drawn to her affinity.

  It was also just as likely that the sound had been caused by the breeze that stirred the hair around her face as she stood still, trying not to breathe as if she’d run a marathon.

  “I’m not going to run from the wind,” Victoria told the garden.

  She made her decision. There was no way she could make it to the cottage if a threat was right around the corner. She decided to face whatever had made the sound head-on rather than flee.

  The first step was the hardest. After that, she took step after step toward where she’d heard the sound.

  When she came to a branch in the path that led to a large wrought-iron gazebo, she realized she’d found the origin of the sound. The gazebo was covered in ivy, but she could see that it was shaped like a birdcage. The door hung open. She paused for only a second before she forced herself to approach and take the cool iron in her hands. The door to the birdcage gazebo was too heavy to be stirred by a breeze. It protested against movement when she tried to swing it closed.

  But the sound was definitely the metallic sound of hinges rasping she’d heard earlier.

  All the birdcages in the house and the cottage had been arranged with their doors opened. It was as if someone had let all the birds they might once have held free.

  She suddenly didn’t want to close the gazebo’s gated door. She opened it wide instead. The screech of the rusty hinges was loud again in the silent night. The shadowy interior of the gazebo was clearly revealed by the crescent moon. There was no one inside. But there was something. Victoria stepped just inside the door to lean over and pick up a single dark red rose. The skin between her shoulder blades tingled and the hair on her neck rose. She turned to survey the garden behind her. The path was empty. She could see all the way to the edge of the main house, but there were many places she couldn’t see. Buildings and hedges and vines, trees and bushes and deep dark shadows—all of those things were blanketed in midnight mystery.

  The rose was different than the dried cherry blossoms. It felt more like a gift than a warning. The garden was filled with roses. She remembered the rose centerpiece in the black-and-white photograph of Turov and his parents. His mother had loved to garden and grow—grapevines and roses.

  In the moonlight, the rose in her hands took on the same gray color as the roses in the photograph that had moldered long ago.

  Who had opened the gate? Who had left the rose?

  * * *

  Often, particularly after bloody nights, he made his way to his mother’s study. He wasn’t immortal. He could bleed. He could die. But those he’d loved had been nothing but ash for years. How many times had he seen his mother serve tea from the prized firebird service she’d brought with her from Russia? Yet all of those da
ys had been the blink of an eye. Beneath glass, the vintage set was cold. He hadn’t preserved the warm memories as easily as he’d preserved the gilded porcelain.

  He sat in his father’s chair and paged through the fairy tale book. The language and art on its pages soothed him. The pages had remained more vibrant and alive with memories than the tea set.

  His mother had always loved the firebird tale, but they had been poor. Peasants. It was after he made his bargain with the daemon when he returned from the Order that he had changed their lives. He had refused to speak about his experience. His injuries healed. His scars were noted with stoic, if concerned, silence. It had been a blessing to be able to provide them with a luxurious life while he lived with the curse of Brimstone in his blood. The Revolution had driven them to America, which had been another blessing in disguise. It had distanced his family from his far more dangerous business of hunting the Order while giving them the vineyards to focus on instead.

  His mother had been too observant. She’d known he was somehow not his own man. That’s when her fascination with her favorite fairy tale had grown. She’d filled his home with images of the firebird and a plethora of empty, gilded cages.

  She had hated his continued imprisonment even after he’d escaped the Order, but she had loved him all the same.

  He missed the family that had loved him before the Brimstone and accepted him after. But he was also conscious of the allure of Victoria. She could never love him, but she was drawn to his Brimstone rather than repelled by it.

  See me.

  Know me.

  It burned him with possibility more than the Brimstone burned.

  He paged through the beloved book, but as he did something niggled at the edges of his perception. Time gave a person heightened senses. Like time-lapse photography, a millimeter of movement in a room you’d visited every day for fifty years stood out like a scream. On the shelf, he saw the wooden box his mother had owned before he’d been taken by the Order. She’d made her own wine even then. He remembered the flasks of simple red so unlike the sophisticated pinot noir Nightingale created now. The box was simple. His father had carved it from a dead walnut tree. It was no treasure for a burglar to disturb and yet someone had disturbed it.

  Only a nearly immortal person would have noticed the difference in its placement after seeing it one way for so many years and then seeing it tilted ever so slightly another.

  He placed the book back on the table and stood. Even before he approached the box and picked it up, he knew what he would find. His mother’s firebird keys were gone. And he knew the beautiful burglar who had taken them.

  Victoria had a mission. And now she had discovered the tools she would need to fulfill it. He held the empty box for a while trying to recall the way it had looked in his mother’s hands. It was a distant memory. Hazy and indistinct. He visited the room the way one might visit a cemetery. To pay his respects. To grieve. His mourning had been disturbed by a nightingale who had forgotten how to sing.

  He could show her how. He could feel the inspiration he could provide burning in his veins. But he hadn’t been seeking justice for so long that he’d forgotten the lesson of the wildflowers. Burning and burning until they were nothing but ash in the sun.

  Chapter 7

  Victoria was smudged and covered in dust and grime for several days as she explored the main house from the attic to the basement, where centuries of detritus was stored in boxes and chests. Every day she watched and waited for Turov to leave, but she’d had many close calls with the master of the vineyard as well as his employees. She wasn’t barred from the house. Far from it. There was a library she’d been invited to use and the kitchen was always open for her to graze or order a tray of tea or snacks brought to the cottage.

  But she was sure she was the only guest who crept around trying vintage skeleton keys in every locked door. She hadn’t really expected to find a wing of rooms filled with evil monks. But she had hoped for clues to point her in the direction of where Turov might hold his prisoners.

  Mostly, she’d intruded upon memories of days gone by.

  She had discovered that none of her keys fit the lock on Adam Turov’s office door or the door of his apartments...the most likely place for secrets to be found.

  It was late afternoon by the time a vacuuming maid had caused her to give up on locked doors for the day. She’d almost exhausted the doors her keys would unlock anyway. She’d asked for tea in the rose garden and the cook had been happy to oblige because she’d made very few requests so far.

  Once Victoria had washed her hands, she discovered the cook had even asked some of Turov’s men to carry a chaise longue and a small table into the clearing in the center of the garden where an ivy-covered arbor provided shade. It was a spot that would have been perfect for a fainting Edwardian woman who needed to loosen her corset and guzzle some tea after a long morning of social calls.

  Victoria sat in her dusty jeans and smudged flannel shirt and put her feet up. In spite of the thick rosebushes all around her, she was able to eye several buildings in the distance that might be worth investigation.

  “Your hair in the sunlight rivals the roses,” Turov said.

  She looked from the buildings with a start. The intensity of his blue eyes rivaled the Sonoma sky, so vivid against the white clouds and green surroundings that his gaze made her chest ache.

  But she wouldn’t tell him that.

  She wouldn’t tell him how exploring his house and the memories he’d carefully kept for a hundred years made her itch to reach out and hold him. Even now, though he walked into the clearing in a suit cut so tight and sharp that its tailoring perfectly mimicked his cheekbones and angular jaw.

  Untouchable.

  But his Brimstone burn said otherwise.

  She was exhausted from her search and from the tension of snooping where she didn’t belong, but as he approached she still bit her lip against a song. It was one she didn’t know how to sing. New and different, throaty and sweet, it rose from her gut in a sultry curl like smoke.

  “Esther told me you’d asked for tea. I thought I’d join you, if you don’t mind,” Turov said. As he spoke, a man carried another chair into the clearing and placed it beside her chaise longue.

  It would be a mistake to have tea with a man who once made a deal with the devil that still burns in his veins.

  “Of course. Please,” Victoria said. She didn’t sing.

  But she did feel faint when Turov settled close beside her as if they were going to enjoy an intimate tête-à-tête. She resisted the magnetic pull of his blood. She didn’t resist meeting his gaze. She was a terrible spy. He must see her guilt swirling in her irises. Yet she looked because he compelled her to look, not with Brimstone, but with all else she might be able to see. Time. All the things he’d seen and done and endured. How had anyone ever imagined him to be in his late twenties when his eyes were so obviously much, much older than that?

  “The tea might take a little while. I made a special request that might take them longer than the usual service,” Turov said.

  “I don’t mind,” Victoria said. In truth, her throat was parched, but more from dust and nervousness than thirst. Would he see her smudged appearance and wonder what in the world she’d been up to? “I’ve been hiking. It’s nice to rest.”

  He raised a brow. Her wilted appearance could have been caused by a long hike around his estate. But when Turov leaned toward her it wasn’t a leaf he plucked from her hair to hold out to her like a chivalrous offering. It was a telltale fluff of attic insulation.

  She reached to take it from his fingers and allowed it to float to the ground where the yellow puff lay in the grass like a shout of accusation.

  “The cook’s name is Esther?” she asked. “I noticed everyone calls her by her title rather than her name.”

 
“I knew her before she was a cook,” Adam explained. “But she’s very proud of her position and has earned the title most proficiently.”

  Victoria didn’t mention that Esther was at least seventy years old. The rosy-cheeked, wrinkled woman had twinkling eyes and a spring in her step in spite of her age. She seemed years from retirement. She’d noticed that Adam was warmer to his people than most wealthy men. Did he remember what it was like to be less than he was today?

  “She’s been the heart of my home for many years. I’m sure you’ve noticed the air of abandonment in much of the house. Esther’s kitchen is the exception. Before my mother died, she was also like Esther—strong, but all heart. My mother’s name was Elena. She was born of the sturdiest stock. Her hands were calloused because she kept them in the dirt. That’s what I remember most about her. The scent of soil and green and growing things. The scent of her roses,” Adam said.

  Two men carefully carried the firebird tea service into the rose garden on a silver tray. Esther must not have trusted one alone with the task. They each held one end of the tray as if they carried a great and precious burden. The extra time must have been spent washing the pot, cups and saucers until they gleamed. How frightening it must have been for the cook to be asked to take on such a task.

  “It’s beautiful,” Victoria said. Tears burned at the back of her eyes and her throat tightened. Her voice was huskier than usual. She had disturbed Elena Turov’s sitting room without permission and now Adam Turov had the firebird tea service brought into the sun for the first time in decades...for her.

  “The service was a gift from my father. My mother loved the firebird fairy tale. She was one to hold on to the old ways and old tales. Russia was settled by Slavs in the early sixth century. It’s from these ancestors that the Slavic firebird tales were passed down to us from generation to generation. My father gave her this fairy tale in so many ways. He said she was his firebird because she had escaped the Russian Revolution and taken flight to America,” Adam said. “She would have loved your hair. The flames in it. She only grew scarlet roses because she said they reminded her of the firebird’s flight.”